Dan Paysner has lived many lives. He's been an international tennis star, an Academy

Award-winning actor. One time he was even the governor of Ohio but you've probably never heard of him.

I don't think anybody's coming through the bookshelves in Barnes and Noble and saying

oh this is a Daniel Paysner book I should buy it.

They're buying it because of the celebrity name that's on the spine.

Paysner is a ghost writer. He's written 70 books, including 17 New York Times bestsellers.

His clients have included Serena Williams, Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, and

Avanka Trump. His job is to get inside the heads of people who tend to be very

careful about what they reveal. You know you push people to reflect and

reconsider the stuff of their lives for public consumption. It's a very sort of

naked and personal and intimate transaction that happens between a

ghost writer and his subjects. That intimate relationship may not earn Pacer

credit on the spine of a book. But it pays his bills.

A few years ago, I would say to somebody or 100,000 for my writer and I'd be sort of crossing my fingers and thinking,

oh my God, I'm never going to get away with this.

But now I was like, oh, 100,000, course.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

I'm Zachary Krakit.

Today, Ghost Writers.

The practice of writing material for publication under someone else's name goes back thousands of years.

But the word ghostwriter took hold in the 1920s. It was used by sports agent

Christie Walsh.

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